[3] Cole wrote that, as an undergraduate, Coventry was a friend of Thomas Ashton, and they prayed with prisoners; but that later he was an "infidel".
[4] He was a correspondent of John Byrom, who had taught him shorthand at Cambridge in 1730;[5][6] and was on good terms with William Melmoth the younger, a contemporary at Magdalene, who called him "my very ingenious friend, Philemon to Hydaspes", and dedicated to him his first work, Of an Active and Retired Life (1735).
[3] With Charles Bulkley and Richard Fiddes, Coventry was a prominent defender of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.
[13] In questioning the language and "luscious images" used in devotional literature, he cited The Fire of the Altar of Anthony Horneck, and wrote of the "wild extravagances of frantic enthusiasm".
That was in relation to Warburton's Hieroglyphics;[5] also of making unfair use of information communicated in confidence, which was to be published in the second volume of The Divine Legation of Moses.